January 11, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) –Parler, a social media alternative to Twitter, has sued Amazon after the platform was blacklisted from Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Sunday.
Employee activists had pushed Amazon to “deny Parler services until it removes posts inciting violence, including at the Presidential inauguration” and effectively blamed Parler for violence at last week’s U.S. Capitol protest.
In a letter to Parler, Amazon claimed that the platform experienced “a steady increase in … violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms.” “You remove some [content] when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency,” the letter reads.
Amazon also hosts Twitter, which allows a wide range of anti-Trump, anti-Semitic, and other violent messaging. Twitter, like Facebook, was used to organize the protest at the U.S. Capitol last Wednesday, as well.
“AWS’s decision to effectively terminate Parler’s account is apparently motivated by political animus,” the complaint filed by Parler in the U.S. District Court of Seattle states.
“It is also apparently designed to reduce competition in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter,” the suit continues, charging Amazon with violations of antitrust law.
“Last Month, Defendant Amazon Web Services, Inc. (“AWS”) and the popular social media platform Twitter signed a multi-year deal so that AWS could support the daily delivery of millions of tweets,” the filing said, noting Twitter CEO’s apparent endorsement of Amazon’s ban.
Parler is also suing Amazon for breaking its contract, “which requires AWS to provide Parler with a thirty-day notice before terminating service, rather than the less than thirty-hour notice AWS actually provided,” according to Parler’s lawsuit.
Before Amazon’s ban took Parler offline, hackers conducted a breach of around 70 terabytes worth of data, including private and deleted messages, from Parler users.
“These are original, unprocessed, raw files as uploaded to Parler with all associated metadata,” claimed one of the hackers. Roughly 110,000 video URLs, totaling 57TB of data, were affected by the breach and subsequently uploaded to The Internet Archive.
“Bad news. Left extremists have captured and archived over 70TB of data from Parler servers. This includes posts, personal information, locations, videos, images etc. The intent is a mass dox and a list to hold patriots ‘accountable’. It is too late to scrub your data, and its already archived. There is nothing you can do to prevent what’s already happened. All you can do is prepare for the fallout,” reads a message allegedly from North Central Florida Patriots Telegram and quoted by The Independent.